I’ve just released a new update for Meta Tag Manager, a complete rewrite and bump up to version 2.0.

This was my first ever plugin to be submitted to the WordPress repository over 7 years ago! Back in the day, there weren’t any (or none I found) plugins that would allow you to add meta tags to your site. This was somewhat a pain for me whenever I needed to add google or yahoo verification meta tags to connect to their webmaster tools. Sure, you can edit the theme header, but that presented problems when updating the theme and was also just less convenient overall.

Over the years, other plugins came out that served my purposes, and in other cases I just verified my sites over DNS. As other plugins took up more of my time, this one fell by the wayside, and it has been four years since my last update!

I love coding. Plain and simple. I love making things that people find useful and make an impact online, and I fulfill this passion by creating code and sharing it with others. Whilst I’ve been wearing many hats in my work/career environment over the recent years, my coder/developer hat is and has always been my favorite.

Over the past few years due to work, time constraints, life and other priorities, this blog along with various WordPress plugins I had written in the past have been neglected. My last post was in 2012…. yikes! Yet funnily enough, I still refer people to that post as recently as this year, so the thought that I could be writing something that’s useful to someone is certainly an inspiration to get this going again.

I also have plugins that haven’t been updated in many years, and still seem to have a following. Therefore, I’m committing to reviving some of these plugins and showing this blog some love.

Since the recent update of version 3.4, many users have started to experience issues with their sites not working correctly, particularly due to JavaScript features such as datepickers, autocompleters, etc. failing to work as before.

For plugin developers like myself, it’s a pain in the @!+ as I’m now seeing users run into this problem on a daily basis for a few weeks now, and it has become obvious that the problem in every case is the forced loading of jQuery library files from CDNs, particularly Google.

The aim of loading jQuery libraries from external sources is to speed up page loading time, so no wonder why theme makers jump at this quick speed upgrade.

However, whilst there’s nothing wrong with doing this theoretically, they way they’re going about it couldn’t be more wrong! The various misleading posts circulating the web are most likely the cause of such a widespread problem, and now we’re starting to see the consequences as time passes.

This was inspired by David Walsh’s MooTools implementation. Check out his demo to see functionality, it’s the same thing except you can control the fade speed and cursor image, as long with start/end dates for special occasions.

Activate it for Valentines Day for a special surprise, if that’s today you’ll know what I mean 🙂

Multilingual wordpress sites are not as straight-foward to create as you may think (unless you’re using multi-site). There are various plugins that make this easier, although they all lack something or other (my favourite is qTranslate so far). It gets tricky when you add custom text to sidebars, other plugins, or your themes. It’s not really the fault of the translation plugins either, because it’s literally impossible to reliably force plugin outputs to be translated in a user-friendly manner.

When choosing WordPress plugins, you need to keep in mind that these are open source, therefore each plugin is maintained by someone for free, so some plugins are made by people that aren’t experienced coders (which may result in the plugin preventing your site from loading), or may not have time or resources to maintain the plugin to keep up with new WordPress releases.

This becomes especially important when considering the crucial and complex plugins that make your site work the way you need, as finding a replacement in the future may be prove to be much more laborious than doing a little due diligence beforehand. Imagine, for example, if your photo gallery stopped working when you upgrade to the latest version of WordPress!

Due to this, it’s important to take certain things into consideration when choosing a plugin, and if keep these in mind you’ll probably find that your selected plugins get updated with the new WP releases and are regularly improved. There’s lots of factors that you need to consider when choosing a plugin. Below are some of the major things to think about:

Matt posted a small bit regarding the recent alert NetworkSolutions put up claiming that there was a vulnerability (not giving a link either, undeserved). Turns out that the issue had nothing to do with wordpress, and more to do with their file permissions. His aptly titled post, Secure File Permissions Matter raises a good point about security in general…. your site is as secure as your server, which is actually as secure as where your server is kept.

I had a chance to install the recently released WordPress 3 Beta 1 onto my PC and I thought I’d highlight some of the most notable (in my opinion at least) new features that you can expect. For a more comprehensive list of improvements, head on over the 3.0 features page on the Wordpress Codex